Minimizing power usage is an important focus for networking products. For example, recently Energy Star prompted the IEEE 802.3 group to work according to a standard called Energy Efficient. Ethernet (EEE). As part of the effort to meet this standard, physical layer networking devices (PHYs) are now typically designed to power down as much as possible when there is no network traffic. However, devices associated with media access control (MAC), such as processors, field programmable gate arrays, and so on, that receive packets from PHYs and process packets for transfer outside of a local network are typically maintained in a powered state so that they can be ready to receive packets for processing at any time.